The present invention relates to the field of jewelry design. More particularly, this invention relates to a computer system and program for creating jewelry designs.
Jewelry design normally involves the creation of individualized jewelry items. For example, a diamond necklace may be designed to have a wide variety of numbers of diamonds, diamond shapes, diamond quality, diamond placements or orientations, chain lengths, chain designs or color. An appropriate selection of these or other characteristics can result in a necklace which is highly attractive to certain individual customers and for which those customers may pay a premium to express themselves through the jewelry design. Generally, to create such a design, a highly skilled artisan assimilates information concerning the design, including specific information from one or more potential purchasers. The designer then creates a feature design and lays that feature design out on a neckline (or other feature path) a number of times, each time re-sizing and re-orienting the feature to reflect the feature placement on the feature path. The difficulty with this process is that re-sizing and re-orienting a single or multiple feature item a number of times is a time consuming and inefficient process. Such a conventional process does not provide the designer with the freedom to quickly create multiple designs.
Furthermore, because the conventional design process does not enable a designer to quickly create multiple designs, design changes suggested by individual customers or other persons (e.g., sales personnel) having information to be used in the design are generally not directly incorporated into the design process. This is a problem because the more involved a customer is in the creation of the design, the more attached the customer may become to the resulting item of jewelry. Similarly, the more involved sales personnel are in creating a design, the more customer information is incorporated into the design and the more the sales person will be involved in selling that specific design.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a method and apparatus to create a jewelry design.
It is another object of the present invention to provide a method and apparatus that automatically places feature items along a jewelry feature path.
It is still another object of the present invention to provide a method and apparatus that automatically places feature items along a jewelry feature path in three dimensions.
It is still a further object of the present invention to provide a method and apparatus that automatically arranges and orients feature items at a defined angle with respect to a tangent to a jewelry feature path.
It is still another object of the present invention to provide a method and apparatus that enables a potential customer to participate in the jewelry design.
It is still a further object of the present invention to provide a method and apparatus having an interface that automatically arranges and orients feature items along a jewelry feature path according to characteristics specified by a potential customer.
The present invention utilizes a computer program to size and orient one or more feature items on a jewelry design having a feature path. Typically feature paths are necklines, wristbands, broaches or rings. A feature item is a gemstone, set of gemstones or metal designs such as a cross, circle or other artful shape. The program and computer system of the present invention selects a feature path, detects a starting location on the feature path and then orients a first feature item in three dimensions on this feature path with respect to a three dimensional surface representing the jewelry wearer. Orienting the feature item in three dimensions is critical so that the feature item is properly displayed on the jewelry when the jewelry is worn. Once the initial feature item has been oriented, subsequent feature items are automatically placed on the feature path, sized with respect to the initial feature item and oriented with respect to both the initial feature item and the three dimensional surface. This automatic sizing and orientation of subsequent feature items quickly creates a complete jewelry design.